Tech —

Why Amazon went Big Brother on some Kindle e-books

Customers were left puzzled as to why Amazon would reach out and delete e- …

Amazon.com shocked customers yesterday when it reached out to hundreds, if not thousands of Kindles and simply deleted texts that users had not only purchased, but had started to read. A literary coitus interruptus, Amazon spoiled the readers' descent into Orwellian masochism with nary a warning or apology.

Sometime on Thursday, users had an eerie feeling that they were being watched, receiving emails stating that their purchases were being refunded. When they connected to the Kindle's WhisperNet, the purchases in question were automatically deleted. Some could only wonder: how often could this happen? Perhaps the Thought Police Amazon Customer Service team could cut off your books whenever they wanted to.

With Amazon's tramping on the works of Orwell, customers felt their utopian world of tree-saving e-book consumption trampled upon. They lamented their un-e-books, finding themselves feeling hollow. With what could their hearts be filled to restore the escape they crave?

(OK, we'll stop with the forced 1984 allusions now.)

The story first popped up when customers began crying foul on the Amazon community, and several sites covered it, including the NYTimes. What no one could determine for certain was "why" this was happening. Amazon's email to customers gave the impression that the publisher had a change of heart: "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store." That didn't tell the whole story, however.

Ars Technica has learned that this was more serious than a publisher flippantly changing course. Accusations that Amazon had caved to the powerful meanderings of a "major publisher" were far off the mark, although the cause is still unsettling. As it turns out, the books in question were being sold by Amazon despite being unauthorized copies. The works weren't legit. It was all copywrong. In other words, Amazon was selling bad books. Hot letters. Pilfered paragraphs.

MobileReference, the publisher in question, formats and sells public domain books on Amazon. The only problem is that George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 are not yet in the public domain, at least not in the US. According to Amazon's statement to Ars Technica, "These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books." When the publisher informed Amazon of this, Amazon moved to rectify the situation. The two books are no longer listed on MobleReference's website, either.

But does Amazon's Terms of Service even allow for this kind of “rectification”? Peter Kafka examined the ToS and believes that there is no backing for this move. The ToS makes it sound as if all sales are final:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

One possible loophole would be in the licensing: Amazon cannot license to you something for which it has no rights to license. Also, we suspect that some indemnification clauses in the third party contracts also put the publisher, not Amazon, on the hook for possible infringement problems.

So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon's purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are "changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."

Bravo to that, but it would have been better for Amazon to tell customers of this planned change directly, in the first place. And why was the system designed to reach out and remove books, anyway?

No word on what Amazon will do to make sure that the books offered by third parties are properly licensed. We wouldn't be surprised to see the company rake over its third party offerings just to be safe.

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.

They should remove the functionality entirely, restore the books from someone who does have the rights to the books, and call it a day. If nobody currently has the ebook rights, then they should negotiate for them.

Going onto my device and pulling them off should not be an option or possibility.

So, how is anybody going to prevent Amazon (or Apple, or Microsoft) from continuing to do these actions? The hardware we are using is become increasingly locked down, the services we use increasingly propritary, and DRM still seen as a solution, yet we keep on buying the items and using the services.

That they can delete stuff off your kindle? Disturbing. That they can determine they are selling unauthorized copies and take steps to revoke those copies? Required by law. I would be more annoyed at the law than at Amazon.

The technical issues here are interesting but not of the most concern.

I'm quite angry that Amazon treats these books as a "service" under which you are "licensed" books. This is why i won't be getting a kindle, the licensed vs sold crap is getting out of hand and the law needs to change to explicitly define in which cases a work like this is sold, or licensed, and that needs to override everything else.

Even if this case had dealt with legitimately licensed (to amazon) books, they appear to retain the right to restrict you from ever selling the copy again, using it on any other device, blah blah blah, simply because they call it a "license" to use the work. Total abuse, and people need to stop paying to be abused like this, but that won't happen because the market for devices like this doesn't understand any of the details.

Originally posted by signal11:What's even more asinine than the kill switch for a book is that George Orwell has been dead for almost 60 years and in the US, ITS STILL NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN.

What's really entertaining is that it IS in the public domain in other countries and readily available through the Australian Gutenberg Project. Would have been interesting to see the response if this had happened after an international release of the Kindle.

There's another troubling aspect to this that's yet to be discussed, and one that's double-plus-ironic considering that one of the deleted books was Orwell's 1984.

If they can download a book, and if they can delete a book, then they certainly have the capability to REPLACE a book. Imagine that some night thousands of Kindle ebooks disappear and then reappear... altered.

Originally posted by ahmlco:There's another troubling aspect to this that's yet to be discussed, and one that's double-plus-ironic considering that one of the deleted books was Orwell's 1984.

If they can download a book, and if they can delete a book, then they certainly have the capability to REPLACE a book. Imagine that some night thousands of Kindle ebooks disappear and then reappear... altered.

Like having your collection of Loren Eiseley's books being replaced with the Twilight series?

If they can download a book, and if they can delete a book, then they certainly have the capability to REPLACE a book. Imagine that some night thousands of Kindle ebooks disappear and then reappear... altered.

You don't this has already happened? I've heard stories about Stephen King's The Stand being updated without the user's permission, just a notification.

Like I said in a previous post is that the notion of a kill switch for a book is disturbing.

The situation we find ourselves in because of these outdated and outmoded laws are beyond that are a comedy of the absurd.

Let's say I live in Seattle. I go across the border to Vancouver. I download a copy from the Australian Project Gutenberg and print a few thousand copies. I then sit on the Canadian side of the border for a day and give a copy to every American who is going back into the US.

Have I just committed a copyright infringement? Yes? No? Maybe? Well, it doesn't even matter.

Why? Because beyond a small circle of people, no cares and furthermore. That's the most disturbing aspect of all of this.

I'm appalled at the idea of losing DRM'd material to the point that I will never buy any, and this simply confirms that sentiment. What further surprises me is Amazon completely botching the PR side of this. How many digital copies of Orwell's works have been downloaded to Kindles? Why didn't Amazon block all further downloads, explain what happened (did they honestly think this could be kept secret?), and buy copies from the rights owner to allow everyone who already downloaded it to keep their copy. Hell, even send them physical copies with a note of apology.

Instead, I foresee the sale of Kindles taking a nosedive in the immediate future, if not indefinitely. Way to blow the public's trust in digital media, Amazon, as tentative as it may have been.

That they can delete stuff off your kindle? Disturbing. That they can determine they are selling unauthorized copies and take steps to revoke those copies? Required by law. I would be more annoyed at the law than at Amazon.

All I know is, if I went down to Barnes & Noble and picked up a paperback copy of 1984, and it turned out the publisher didn't have the rights, nobody would come to my door demanding my copy back. I'm upset at the law, but I'm even more upset at Amazon for giving themselves this power.

Score one for the Pirates. Ive often pondered getting a Kindle..but the price always put me off, however there was always the slightest chance of me just saying the hell with it and plunking down the dough for it. Now however with these Orwellian undertones, forget it.

Originally posted by David Bradbury:I don't like the idea of automatically deleting files from a user's device. That ability should not exist.

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I was actually thinking of getting a Kindle as I like e-books a lot. But now that I have heard this crap there is no damn way in hell I am getting one. Screw Amazon for this fascist censorship crap. What kind of fucking point do they think think they are making anyway?

Also: sooner or later a test case will come along where the courts will have to decide whether the "licensing" clause in the terms of use is kosher. I've been told that courts are already holding that if it is presented as a sale, it is legally a sale whether the TOS calls it "licensed" or not.

Given that this book was 1) illegal and 2) only 99 cents, I doubt that this will be that test case.

Originally posted by Robotech_Master:It may very well be that Amazon can't monitor what is posted there very closely, or risk losing its DMCA safe harbor protection. Not sure, though.

If the laws are so complex or ambiguous that Amazon (or anyone else) can't operate as a book seller, then the laws are not serving the public. If it's Amazon's internal process that is at fault, then they obviously need to clean up their own house before proceeding with something like the Kindle.

Either way, Bezos should be looking into this personally, and pursuing the proper course of action to either get the laws changed or to correct Amazon's own business practices. The future of the Kindle is riding on this.

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In another thread elsewhere, someone brought up the possibility that one of Amazon's competitors could have orchestrated this, right down to using Orwell as the author in question. The irony and publicity can carry this story for a long time in people's minds.

It was really stupid on Amazon's part to delete books on their customer's Kindles. This should have been written policy so any publisher that tries to force Amazon to do it would be told that it is illegal because of their published policy and that the publisher would have to contact the customers themselves to try to get them to delete it on their own.

That they did this with George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm is frigging hilarious! Talk about a public relations nightmare! Guaranteed news item in every show, paper, and blog.

I wonder if they are smart enough to undo the damage. They should publicly apologize and announce that they are shutting off the ability to do this in the future--taking it out of the code and making a written guarantee to customers that it won't happen ever again.

That they can delete stuff off your kindle? Disturbing. That they can determine they are selling unauthorized copies and take steps to revoke those copies? Required by law. I would be more annoyed at the law than at Amazon.

All I know is, if I went down to Barnes & Noble and picked up a paperback copy of 1984, and it turned out the publisher didn't have the rights, nobody would come to my door demanding my copy back. I'm upset at the law, but I'm even more upset at Amazon for giving themselves this power.

The thing is, the chances of you picking up a bootleg copy of a book at your local Barnes and Noble is extremely unlikely, as they generally get their books from major publishers and don't simply sell any book given to them from John Q. Public.

This isn't the case with Amazon, who took the rather bold step of allowing anyone to self publish their works onto the Kindle, this is nice for those authors who don't want to go convince publishers to sell their books, however it can be abused by those choosing to sell works that they don't have the rights to and make a quick buck on the unwary.

Anyway, rather than defend Amazon's actions as a bitter step it had to take in a no win situation. I'll just ask you a simple question, what would you guys have done if you are in Amazon's shoes? Bear in mind that in order for the Kindle to be successful it needs to satisfy at least two groups; Publishers and Consumers, Publishers being the ones who own the rights to the books you sell, who are quite litigation happy, and are already quite wary of your product because you generally try to sell their books at an extremely low price, and Consumers being the ones that buy the books from you, who are also quite litigation happy, and are also quite wary of your product because your device costs 300 bucks and they are quite restricted in what they can do with the books they buy, (also due to their internet-savvy nature, they tend to be quite paranoid, perpetually on the lookout for any actions that can be construed as oppression by a oligarchy seeking to both control them and to take every nickel they have, which they can do with alarming alacrity). Lastly the desires of the two groups tend to be mutually exclusive (Publishers want to sell for more money, Buyers want to buy for less, Publishers want more control over what Consumers do with their content, Consumers want to be able to do what they please with what they buy, etc. etc.). Good luck.

@mikemil828 - What I would have done if I were in Amazon's shoes would have been to purchase the books from the legitimate publishers on behalf of their customers then send out an email saying how they're nice guys for helping out their loyal customers. I doubt it would have cost them that much and would have saved them a whole of lot of bad publicity.

@ljocampo Completely agree with you: this has been my main beef with cloud computing and SAAS ever since I heard of the concept.Also, stuff like this is the very reason why I don't buy anything I cannot sanitize from DRM.